Museo Carmen Thyssen

In this selection of more than fifty images from the José Luis Soler Vila Collection, several decades of documentary photos, from 1930 to 1980, form a mosaic of faces and people who were spotted and caught on film in streets and everyday spaces of the United States by eleven brilliant American photographers. Leading names in their discipline, they exemplify a straightforward approach to reality which they all shared and promoted, each with their own aims and sensibilities, fascinated by capturing life with their cameras in order to simply show it as it is.

The exhibition begins with pieces by the pioneers, such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Louis Faurer, and ends with the colour pictures of Harry Callahan, Anthony Hernandez and Tod Papageorge from the 1960s and later.  This assortment of snapshots of american people and their everyday lives highlights the importance of the genre and enables us to trace its development, as well as to ‘put a face’ to the diverse and complex social realities of the United States over six decades.

By capturing images of real life, documentary photography showed itself to be a hybrid genre receptive to historical testimony, portraiture, the stimulus of the street, psychological and sociological investigation, social criticism, irony, storytelling… The coexistence and combination of different trends, ranging from photojournalism to straight, humanist and street photography, enriched its documentary essence and enabled photographers to put their personal stamp on their work.

Ultimately, taking reality as their basis, reproducing it accurately and even infusing it with an enigmatic quality was the shared aspiration of all these approaches. So was looking at the ordinary, that which usually goes unnoticed, and making photography a sample of life.

Beautiful People
Tod Papageorge at Studio 54
José Luis Soler Vila Collection
Espacio ArteSonado

In 1978 Tod Papageorge (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1940) made it through the famous velvet rope line at the entrance to the Studio 54 nightclub – a much-coveted achievement during the club's short three-year existence – which marked a kind of fabulous boundary between the real New York and the wild and select universe that unfolded inside.

Inspired by Brassaï's images of 1930s Paris, which he had seen in an exhibition at the MoMA, and like him equipped with a medium-format camera, Papageorge watched a motley assortment of celebrities, extravagant characters and anonymous faces parade in front of his lens at the legendary discotheque between 1978 and 1980 – the privileged few who were allowed inside that haven of freedom and pleasure.

From its opening at 254 West 54th Street in Manhattan on 26 April 1977 until its closure in February 1980, Studio 54 attracted, strictly by invitation, the ‘beautiful people’ who lived in or were passing through the city, famous or unknown names who craved celebrity, who wanted to see and be seen. Prominent people from the worlds of film, music, the arts, fashion and politics and partygoers of all stripes flocked to the hottest venue of the moment and immersed themselves in its unique atmosphere of euphoria, fun and debauchery.

Navigating the carefully decorated spaces designed for enjoyment (the dance floor, the bar, the VIP areas and the terrace), Papageorge immortalised the intensely earthly reality of that short-lived paradise of New York nightlife in photos of which a small sample is displayed here. What we see in them is Studio 54 and its mythical aura as a significant cultural and artistic phenomenon: a collection of black and white images that ‘were always meant to speak for themselves’.